The other day, I was talking to a friend and, as old poops will, we tried to figure out when this country started sliding downhill. For instance, when did greed become not only acceptable, but admirable in the eyes of so many? When did we begin to accept that corporate CEOs were not only worth millions and millions of dollars in salary and stock options, but were deserving of their golden parachutes, which provided them with still more millions when their acclaimed business acumen brought their companies to the brink of bankruptcy?

The argument I hear quite often is that if these financial wizards hadn’t been at the helm, their companies would have lost even more money. Imagine if that were an argument we could all use. Employees who had botched a delivery could say, “Well, at least I didn’t burn down the plant” and errant husbands could explain to their wives that while it was true they had committed serial adultery with a great many women, there were several others they had ignored.

When did we come to believe that self-esteem was yet another entitlement to be automatically bestowed on our young people, and not something that was aspired to and earned? At what point did we decide that the kids were supposed to be treated like young monarchs?

The bedroom of a typical middle class kid looks like a Toys ‘R Us warehouse. Sneakers, which used to be the cheapest footwear this side of socks, now cost an arm and a leg. And parents pay the freight because no kid will be seen in public if Kobe or Lebron doesn’t have his name smeared on his shoes. You might think that just out of sheer gratitude, the young sprouts would at least mow the lawn or take out the trash once in a while. But, as you may have noticed, William and Andrew never did any chores around Buckingham Palace, either.

My friend suspected the decline of American civilization began with Nixon and Watergate. He felt it made us cynical about politics and politicians in a way we’d never been before. I disagreed. I felt that Nixon and his scandal created a sea change, but mainly in the way the media operated in this country. Suddenly, journalism became appealing to a certain besotted segment of the youthful population. The kids could picture themselves as the next Woodward or Bernstein, getting rich and famous while bringing down the high and mighty.

I happen to think that the country’s general decline began in the 1960s. For the first time in history, youngsters were being held up as the moral, behavioral and cultural, arbiters of the nation. Parents were looking to their children as role models. Forty-year-olds were suddenly trying to dress, think and even wear their hair, like teenagers.

The combination of drugs, free sex, and irresponsible parents, made it inevitable that an entire generation grew up despising not only their own parents and the parents of their friends, but all authority figures. They called cops “pigs” and they spit on soldiers. The only adults they had any use for were those whom they regarded as rebels, mainly cynical poseurs who made a handsome living thumbing their noses at what passed for polite society – people like Hunter Thompson, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, and safely tenured liberal arts professors.

Please understand that I have had my own share of distaste for notable figures. I still do. They just don’t happen to be the same ones that left-wingers resent. Whereas the perpetually infantile vent their spleen on such decent folks as Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney, Michele Bachmann, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, I reserve my contempt for the likes of Jesse Jackson, Michael Moore, Al Sharpton, Ariana Huffington, Sean Penn and Barack Obama.

I don’t think you have to be a super patriot or any sort of patriot at all to despise people who have become rich and famous by cashing in on their contempt of America. This is, after all, probably the only nation on earth where such mediocrities could garner so much wealth and prominence. Biting the hand that feeds you is bad enough when the ingrate has four legs, but it’s far more contemptible when he or she has only two.